There is now a trend for people to work in their homes where possible, rather than at a remotely situated office. Working at home affords the distinct advantage of eliminating long commutes between the office and home. There are individuals who would like to work at home for many reasons, such as to care for an infant or infirm relative, but find themselves unable to do so because of the nature of their jobs. In the past, individuals who have been employed as telemarketing agents, with the responsibility to answer telephone inquires and handle telephone transactions for customers, have generally not been able to work at home. Heretofore, it has not been possible to economically provide an agent at home with sufficient telephone service and data base access capability to enable the agent to efficiently handle customer inquires and to complete a customer transaction over the telephone. As a consequence, telemarketing agents have had to work at remote facilities (i.e., transaction-processing centers) where sufficient telephone service and data base access capability could be efficiently provided.
There are now efforts to enable a telemarketing agent to accept customer inquiries and to complete customer transactions while the agent is at home, rather than at the transaction-processing center. One such effort involves having the agent at home (the "home-agent") make an initial telephone call to the transaction-processing center so as to be connected to a private branch exchange (PBX) or an automatic call director at the center. In this way, the home-agent seizes a trunk (i.e., a line) to the transaction-processing center so that an incoming customer inquiry can be directed to the home-agent through the seized trunk. If the seized trunk were an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) B and D channel trunk, then the home-agent could conduct a voice discussion with a customer, while simultaneously communicating data with a computer data base at the transaction-processing center. If the seized trunk were only capable of carrying voice signals, then a separate data trunk line between the home-agent and the transaction-processing center would be required.
The disadvantage associated with this approach is that the home-agent must remain continuously connected to the transaction-processing center to handle a customer inquiry or complete a requested transaction. Thus, the home-agent must seize an incoming trunk to the transaction-processing center for the entire length of the work period even though the trunk may remain idle for a sizable fraction of that time while the home-agent is in between customer calls. For the entire time that the trunk is seized, line charges must be paid, making this approach to providing the home-agent with sufficient telephone service and data base access capability expensive.
Thus, there is a need for a technique for efficiently providing a home-agent with both telephone service and data base access capability at a location remote from a transaction-processing center.